The Experience of Experience of the Mystery of Mystery

Or something. This book on Karl Rahner turned out to be a bit of a chore. Seems rather disjointed and repetitive, plus the attempt to translate English into English renders the prose hardly less annoying. I'll salvage what I can. 

This chapter -- Man in the Presence of Absolute Mystery -- begins with a meditation on the very meaning of the word "God." What if the word were stricken from the dictionary? For an atheist, I suppose nothing would be lost, since the word refers to nothing anyway.

But even then, it must refer to something, even if only to a universal subjective experience, since there is no language that doesn't have an equivalent term for the ultimate transcendent ground of reality. 

Either the word will disappear or it will survive as a question..., a question about the goal and meaning of life. 

This is why I came up with the idea of using a semantically unsaturated symbol (O) for what the word "God" represents to different people -- and the symbol (?!) for the spontaneous irruption of the Experience.

Problem is, if everyone has their own idiosyncratic meaning, then no communication is possible. Rahner seems to have similar concerns, so "instead of a concept," he

uses the phrase "holy mystery." He calls it the "term" of transcendence. Term is related to terminus, end, or goal. This term is both present in transcendence and as the way to transcendence. 

Which very much reminds me of Voegelin, since he too sees transcendence as a term or pole of the great In Between we inhabit -- more like an arrow pointing toward a reality we can never reach: human experience is between the poles of immanence and transcendence. Moreover, the QUESTION is Voegelin's term for 

the transcendental pole of truth as such: "not just any question but the quest concerning the mysterious ground of all being." 

Clearly there is mystery at both ends of the tension (ours and God's), and it seems to me that the majority of mid-to-lowbrow cultural activity is designed to deny the mystery, to make it go away, or to distract us from it. But there it is. It's not going anywhere. Indeed, Rahner refers to it as a permanent existential, and why not? It is "a part of who we are," but

The discovery of this experience itself is a mystery. The mystery is not reducible to what we can say about our transcendental knowledge. 

Ultimately, "the concept of God is not a concept we can grasp. It is, rather, what grasps us." It is always over the subjective horizon, while at the same time being the ground of subjectivity. 

It reminds me of the Big Bang, only on the inside, in that consciousness too forever expands and differentiates. But from what and into what? It's a mystery, but not the unintelligible kind, rather, the infinitely intelligible kind. Like an owl staring at the sun, there's not insufficient but too much Light.

That's me talking. Or at least the caffeine. What does Rahner say? 

transcendental experience allows us to know ourselves as finite beings -- finite beings who can transcend their finitude.

And -- me talking again -- it seems that experience as such is always transcendental. Which is why it is impossible to describe or define, since any description or definition presupposes experience. It seems that experience as such is a rock-bottom, permanent existential -- that it is a ceaselessly flowing Mystery, and that this is simultaneously the least and most we can say about it.

Geez, I hope I'm not turning all Germanic on you, but wading around down here at the bottom of subjectivity is tricky. Here is Voegelin's stab at defining EXPERIENCE: it is "a 'luminous perspective' within the process of reality." And EXISTENTIAL CONSCIOUSNESS is

the reflective self-awareness of human existence in the metaxy, i.e., between poles of immanence and transcendence, finitude and infinity, imperfection and perfection, and so on. See also "truth of existence." 

Okay, don't mind if I do. This latter is "transcendentally oriented conscious existence" and 

involves the experience of: (1) finiteness and creatureliness; (2) dissatisfaction with imperfection and a sense of transcendental perfection; (3) the luminosity or manifestness of such experience in consciousness; (4) the self-transcending tendency of consciousness seeking fullness of truth.

Sounds like a luminous movement toward perfect truth, goodness, and beauty, or something.

For Rahner, 

transcendental knowledge comes from a direct contemplation of the source of transcendence. We contemplate it and call it "God."  

The problem -- or temptation -- is that

by speaking of God, we might lose sight of what we mean. What we mean is the source of the experience of transcendence, the holy mystery. It might be obscured by the concept we use to express it. If we try to describe the source as "absolute being," we might settle for an abstraction, not the source itself.

Now, the Big Question is whether this post is getting anywhere, or if we're just going around in circles on some kind of wild nous chase. I can't answer that, but Rahner "proposes that we call the source of our original experience of transcendence the 'holy mystery,'" so as not to confuse it "with a stereotype, a myth, or a conventional image."

Certainly we can agree that "Anyone searching for God 'contained in' reality seeks a false God." But not so fast, because "Those searching for a God wholly other and distant will never know God or themselves" either.

So, it seems we can say a lot about God, but we can always say more: "that is why we acknowledge that God is infinite, indefinable, and ineffable." 

It's repetitive, but maybe it needs to be:

The experience of transcendence opens up to us the holy mystery. It is a "mystery" because we cannot fully fathom it.... Rather, holy mystery is what we encounter in the experience of transcendence. Transcendence moves us in freedom and love towards its goal.  

Which we never reach. For again, "We human beings are the tension"

between our categorical statements about God and the transcendental reality itself.... it is the experience of all people who know themselves as being constantly in a relationship with a mystery....

Instead of being an object we know, God is what allows any knowledge whatsoever to take place.

I'll buy that, but I'll tell you what: wouldn't it be nice if God himself could accommodate us and just incarnate as the Mystery or something? That would be a big help. Perhaps we'll tackle this subject in the next post. Or move on to a less annoying subject.

I Am the Question

The previous post ended with a description of our politico-cultural matrix, and the image comes to mind of a Roach Motel. If you're a roach, the best policy is to not venture in at all, because if you do, you're not coming out. 

You could say the motel is "designed to trap prey," but not really, because at least the predator has a use for the prey. Spiders don't catch insects just for the hell of it. Snakes only eat when they're hungry, which is only every week or two.

But it seems this Predator does enjoy trapping and toying with its prey just for the hell of it. I wonder what Uncle Screwtape would say? Not sure, but while looking it up I found this:

There is no neutral ground in the universe: every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan (Lewis).

And this:

In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud. 

So, the Motel is on the inside? And locks from the inside? Hell is

the outer rim where being fades away into nonentity.... the damned are, in one sense, successful rebels to the end... the doors of hell are locked on the inside....  

Now, what does this have to do with the book I began reading yesterday, The Foundations of Karl Rahner: A Paraphrase of the Foundations of Christian Faith? Maybe we could start by asking why the human head is such a battleground, with claims and counterclaims.  

For Rahner, human beings are the "universal question." This being the case, I suppose there will always be bad, superficial, partial, and dysfunctional answers. The deeper point is that our unlimited questioning implies our own unlimitedness, i.e., transcendence:

we, in the very act of reflecting on our limitations, overcome those limitations.... We know ourselves as capable of knowing more, of transcending what had limited us before. This experience of transcendence provides an indirect knowledge of God... 

This is very much reminiscent of Voegelin, in that we are always situated between the poles of immanence and transcendence, and that's just the way it is: "the human being is open by nature," which is the key to transcendence:

We know ourselves as capable of knowing more. That is the essence of transcendental experience.

In realizing this, God is implicitly present: 

present as mystery, as the absolute and incomprehensible source of all that is. What we know, in knowing anything, is that our knowledge is a small vessel in a vast sea of mystery.

Agreed:

this is what makes us human. We have been created with the ability to encounter the transcendent God in the experiences of daily life.

Or not, which I suppose goes to the battlefield alluded to above. Which further implies that the real battle is between openness-to-transcendence vs. enclosed-in-immanence, no matter what form it takes. Could it be this simple? Or is it simpler?

As persons we are hearers, and

Hearers recognize that they are limited. But in that very recognition, they begin to imagine how they might surpass their limits. That is the first step to actually transcending them.

This will become clearer as we proceed, but this ability to hear is key, for

the philosophy that presumes that the human being is able to hear is not absolutely free of theology. In fact, it is implicit theology.

I would go so far as to say that human personhood presupposes God, for the human being

is capable of transcendence, responsibility, freedom, honesty, and openness to mystery. The Christian message presupposes that its hearers are people with these capacities -- in a word, are persons.

However, there is always the temptation to forgo the mystery in favor of something less, "to shift responsibility for their choices to something else -- to history, let us say, or to nature." Nevertheless, persons qua persons are always "more than what a mechanistic anthropology says we are":

The sciences tempt us to think that we can fully explain ourselves. But this is illusory. Transcendental experience suggests that I myself encompass every effort by science to explain me. The person transcends all attempts to reduce him or her to a system or to full comprehension. 

 So, lead us not into temptation, especially that one.

It's all very Gödelian, for again, "By reflecting on our limits, we begin to imagine new possibilities for ourselves and to transcend our limits" -- a bit like reversing figure and ground. We have plenty of answers, but they never provide a complete answer to the Question we are. Sorry for the repetition, but maybe you didn't hear it the first time:

Whenever a person affirms the possibility that he or she can question things, even in a finite way, that person surpasses the finitude. Why? Because the horizon of finitude is always receding as one discovers more. And as the person experiences that horizon receding, the person experiences himself or herself as spirit. One is spirit whenever one acknowledges one's limits. In that acknowledgement, one has already surpassed the limits...

On the other hand -- again, going to the battle -- 

one can dully and unimaginatively "accept" one's existence without curiosity. This happens when we acknowledge that existence poses a question, but nevertheless refuse to pursue it.  

But just because you are not interested in the battle, it hardly means the battle isn't interested in you: "we are ourselves limited. But in our limits, we are connected to what is absolute," and "We transcend what we are by being open to to what being offers."

one can try to to evade responsibility and pretend that one is merely a product of forces outside oneself. But that is a lie. 

Now, just "Who is the other who enables us to transcend ourselves? We call that other the ineffable mystery." I call it O, but that's the end of chapter one. Tomorrow we'll delve into chapter two, Man in the Presence of Absolute Mystery. 

Horizontal Absurcularity in the Matrix of the Predator

As mentioned in yesterday's post, if the human subject is a miraculous gate opened up in the middle of creation, then so too is the object. We often speak of the irreducible intersubjectivity of human beings, but in Thomist metaphysics there is also a kind of "inter-objectivity" that renders knowledge possible.

That is to say, objects have a kind of dual existence outside and inside our heads. The latter is not the former, but nor is it not the former; specifically, "a thing is the object of the soul in a double way," and "knowledge takes place in the degree in which the thing known is in the knower" (Thomas). 

it is evident that extra-mental realities cannot be in the mind of the knowing subject per se, but they can be there by representation (Garrigou-Lagrange).

In other words, something of the object exists simultaneously in both the object known and in the intellect that knows, AKA the intelligible essence. If not, then to hell with it: there is no knowledge of reality, rather, just an ephemeral dream of a transient hallucination.

Again, "Objectivity is none other than the truth, in which the subject and object coincide" (Schuon). If ideas just relate to other ideas and not to intelligible reality, then Kant is correct: man "is imprisoned in his subjectivity" and "has no way to know if these things have objective existence or not" (Bina & Ziarani). 

Now in reality, it is precisely because of the intellect 

that man can recognize the truth independently of his own subjectivity. The very fact that men communicate with one another, and understand each other, is indicative of common, universal truths, to which all men have access (ibid.). 

This is not to say that man does not enclose himself in matrices of pure subjectivism and relativism: for obviously there are "Those who seek to enclose the Universe within their shortsighted logic" and who fail to understand "that the sum of possible phenomenal knowledge is inexhaustible":

In all this wish to accumulate knowledge of relative things, the metaphysical dimension -- which alone takes us out of the vicious circle of the phenomenal and the absurd -- is expressly put aside; it is as if a man were endowed with with all possible faculties of perception minus intelligence (Schuon).  

It is as if we place arbitrary limits on the limitless, and "Outside its self-imposed but unrecognized limits," intelligence "remains more ignorant than the most rudimentary magic":

One tries to explain "horizontally" that which is explainable only "in a vertical sense".... Such a science is assuredly cut to the measure of modern man who conceived it and who is at the same time its product (ibid.). 

Sad!

Really, it's just Genesis 3 All Over Again: "The world becomes increasingly a system of stage-settings" while "imposing upon it an unshakeable conviction that all this is 'reality' and that there is no other." 

A note to myself in the margin says THE MATRIX, and just this morning I read a good description of how it works these days -- and it seems to be working better than ever. The author says that sometimes

I can see it all around me: the grid. The veins and sinews of the Machine that surrounds us and pins us and provides for us and defines us now. I imagine a kind of network of shining lines in the air, glowing like a dewed spiderweb in the morning sun. I imagine the cables and the satellite links, the films and the words and the records and the opinions, the nodes and the data centres that track and record the details of my life....  

I see this thing, whatever it is, being constructed, or constructing itself around me, I see it rising and tightening its grip, and I see that none of us can stop it from evolving into whatever it is becoming. 

I see the Machine, humming gently to itself as it binds us with its offerings, as it dangles its promises before us and slowly, slowly, slowly reels us in. I think of the part of it we interact with daily, the glowing white interface through which we volunteer every detail of our lives in exchange for information or pleasure or stories told by global entertainment corporations who commodify our culture and sell it back to us. I think of the words we use to describe this interface, which we carry with us in our pockets wherever we go, as we are tracked down every street and into every forest that remains: the web; the net.

I think: These are things designed to trap prey. 

Same: I see it too, and where there is prey, then surely there is a predator. To be continued...

Objectivity and Intersubjectivity

Some excerpts from (and comments on) a somewhat One Cosmos-ish article called The Natural Path to the Transcendent, by George Stanciu:

The great discovery of ethology is that animals do not perceive what things really are; an animal’s perception is limited to a few key elements that will cause it to act.... An animal’s world is not the world we see but more closely resembles “a small, poorly furnished room.”

Other animals essentially live in their neurology, which provides only a kind of crude model projected onto the world. One might say that their engagement with the world is on a need-to-know basis. 

Frogs, for example, don't even need to know about insects per se, but only "small moving objects." The frog "will starve to death surrounded by food if it is not moving. His choice of food is determined only by size and movement." 

How did -- and do -- human beings escape from this representational sub-world? Of course, Kant maintained that we do not and cannot. Rather, just like any other animal, we exist in our own projected categories. They may be more subtle or sophisticated, but we are ultimately no more in touch with reality -- itself unknowable -- than any other animal.

Well, first of all, like anyone could even know that:

If man is subjective and has no way of knowing anything objectively, then how did Kant come to know that man lives in his own subjectivity and is confined to it? In other words, how can a man imprisoned in his own subjectivity proclaim an objective truth about everyone, including himself? (Bina & Ziarani)

As Schuon rightly says, 

The first ascertainment which should impose itself upon man when he reflects on the nature of the Universe is the primacy of that miracle that is intelligence -- or consciousness or subjectivity -- and consequently the incommensurability between these and material objects, be it a question of a grain of sand or of the sun, or of any creature whatever as an object of the senses.

But the second -- or maybe even tied with the first -- would be the miracle that is objectivity, which is to say, the conformity of our own intelligence to the objects of the world.   

The prerogative of the human state is objectivity.... The intelligence is objective to the extent that it registers that which is.

Objectivity is none other than the truth, in which the subject and object coincide... (ibid.).

Back to Stanciu: 

Of all the natural creatures, only human beings can grasp the whole. The study of animal perception re-discovered the spiritual nature of Homo sapiens -- the capacity to be connected to all that is, a fundamental principle of every wisdom tradition.

Also true, but by virtue of what principle? For Schuon,

God has opened a gate in the middle of creation, and this open gate of the world towards God is man... 

Agreed, but how did and does the gate open? Stanciu affirms the One Cosmos view that it has to do with the unique conditions of earliest childhood: 

as the human infant emerges from the womb, it looks for a human face and listens for a soprano voice. Nature directs the infant to seek its mother. The very first experience in a person’s life is connecting himself or herself to another person.

In short, it is precisely our neurological immaturity that becomes the means of induction into the world of intersubjectivity and relatedness to others, eventually mediated by language:

Without language, without others to learn language from, the mental capacities that Ms. Helen Keller, you, and I were born with would not have developed, and our lives would not have been much higher than that of a chimpanzee or a bonobo.

Being subjectively "open systems" is precisely what lifts us out of the condition of being trapped and confined to our own subjective perceptions, which is the fate of other animals. 

But even then, it is possible to reify our own subjectivity and confuse the particular with the universal, which goes to the problem of mind parasites: 

The curse of social living is that every society implants ideas and instills habits of thinking and feeling that limit its members to a particular perspective, one that, as a general rule, is contrary to human nature and destructive to neighboring societies. The paradox is that social living greatly extends our capabilities and yet limits us.

Which is why "Homo sapiens is the only species that can act contrary to its nature." 

Running low on time, but this vertical enclosure is a Big Problem, and it is symbolized by the timeless events of Genesis 3, whereby man foregoes relationship with God in favor of sealing himself in his own pseudo-absoluteness. Is there a way up and out? Yes, but only one assoul at a time:

Of course, the unborn within me, my true self, was a complete mystery, so after stumbling around for years exploring Hinduism and Buddhism, I turned to the deepest understanding of the human person that Christianity offers.

To be continued... 

The World, the Adversary, and the Divine Presence

Unlike artificial intelligence, human intelligence is and must be aware of its limits, on pain of enclosing itself in unintelligence -- or in an intelligent stupidity. Not only is the history of philosophy a history of models of reality, so too is each and every person such a model. 

I suppose the average person has an implicit model composed of fragments and contingencies that one more or less tries to force reality to be; but reality is what it is prior to our thinking about it.

The Existential Climate Emergency is an example of a model that wants to be the reality. And for some reason, people want to be terrified by this model. Indeed, those of us who aren't terrified are lying dog-faced pony soldiers. 

Now, no doubt life itself -- at least in the human mode -- is an unending Emergency. People talk about "identity crises, "midlife crises," and "existential crises," which are somewhat beside the point in the face of the Crisis. 

What is this crisis? Here again, there are as many ways to symbolize it as there are people. Most people don't think it through to the foundation, for which reason a variety of retail crises are available to purchase off the rack, as it were. Higher education, for example, has become little more than the internalization of various crises, which again symbolize and conceal the crisis.  

For example, adolescence is always a crisis, the crisis of the loss of childhood and the uncertainty of what it means to be an adult. Back when I was an adolescent I assumed that attainment of adulthood would end the crisis, but it just replaces one with another.  

Come to think of it, I also assumed that acquisition of a Ph.D. would end the crisis of epistemology -- or, in the parlance of the times, of being an idiot, and I suppose it worked for at least a couple of weeks before I came to my senses and realized the models weren't the reality. 

It was around that same time that I was in my phase of peak leftism, which again allows one to project and externalize one's existential crisis into those various off-the-rack concerns alluded to above, from structural racism to nuclear power to American imperialism, et al. 

You can deny a lot of personal problems by pretending that we're all gonna die from, say, a nuclear power plant meltdown. I suppose you had to be there, but the hysteria worked, since it resulted in the abolition of nuclear power in California. Apparently there's one plant left, scheduled to be shut down in 2025. 

And yet, people are no happier, since one crisis is just replaced by another (and the "solution" to one crisis often causes the next one). Similarly, the moment homosexuals are allowed to marry, we find ourselves in a crisis of "transphobia." 

Along these lines, Schuon writes that 

Serenity is to keep oneself so to speak above the clouds, in the calm and coolness of emptiness and far from the dissonances of this lower world; it is never to allow the soul to immerse itself in impasses of disturbances, bitterness, or secret revolt....

The man who is conscious of the nature of pure Being willingly remains in the moment that Heaven has assigned to him; he is not feverishly straining towards the future nor does he dwell lovingly or sadly over the past. The pure present is the moment of the Absolute: it is now -- neither yesterday nor tomorrow -- that we stand before God.

In the same book (Echoes of Perennial Wisdom) he writes that

The habitual dream of the ordinary man lives on the past and future; his heart hangs, as it were, over the past and is carried away by the future at one and the same time, instead of resting in Being.

This is not what you would call practical or pragmatic advice, but then again, the most important truths are for their own sake, not for the sake of any lesser end. It seems that the implicit motivation for all those Practical Concerns is to finally abide in Being. Is it possible to bypass the middle man and proceed straight to Being? Asking for a friend.

Whatever may be the phenomena and whatever their causes, there is always That Which Is; and That Which Is, is beyond the world of tumult, contradictions, and disappointments.... Nothing can tarnish It, and no one can take it from us.... the accidents pass, the Substance remains (ibid.).

Sounds good! Where do we sign up? 

Let the world be what it is and take refuge in Truth, Peace, and Beauty, wherein is neither doubt nor any blemish.

Easier said than done?

there is in every man a tendency to attach too much to this or that element of passing life or to worry about it too much, and the adversary takes advantage of this in order to cause troubles for us.

Probably to understand the nature of this adversary is to stop externalizing him into all those myths provided by the world to explain and justify our unhappiness. Rather, it is necessary to 

not allow ourselves to be excessively troubled by the things of the world, seeing that dissonances cannot but exist, the world being what it is.  

Life would be great if it weren't for... the world.   

Now, the world -- our world, anyway -- is person, time, and place; I mean everybody has to be someone somewhere at some time. 

On the one hand, one has to resign oneself to being what one is, and on the other hand one has to become a place of the Divine Presence....

On the one hand, one has to resign oneself to being where one is, and on the other hand, one has to turn this place into a center through the remembrance of God....

On the one hand, one has to resign oneself to living in the moment in which one lives, and on the other hand one has to turn this moment into an Eternal Present, which every present moment becomes through the Remembrance of God... 

So, we got that going for us.

Being, Reality, Absoluteness, and Other Truths that Matter

I'll keep repeating it as long as Davila keeps saying it:

In each moment, each person is capable of possessing the truths that matter.

Each person is also capable of feeling puzzled by all the ins & outs and what-have-yous that must be integrated and woven into the cosmic area rug. Maybe it's just the stress talking, but sometimes the mind is not limber and the plan is too complicated. We're suddenly out of our element and lose our train of thought. There is no frame of reference. 

When this happens to me, I go back to basics -- to the truths that matter to which the Aphorist alludes. What are they? 

We touched on the subject yesterday, but only very lightly. We need a plan -- not a complicated one, because something always goes wrong with one of those. Rather, one that is beautiful in its simplicity, like a Swiss philosopher.

Schuon's simplest book is called Echoes of Perennial Wisdom, consisting of short passages, often a single sentence. I wouldn't say they're aphorisms, since their more blunt, nor do they twist the knife, as do so many of Davila's wise cracks. For example, here is the first one:

The worth of man lies in his consciousness of the Absolute.

Of course, this has a lot of missing context and implications that the reader must bring to the table. Davila may convey the same idea, but more in the form of a guffah-HA! experience -- for example, 

Each one sees in the world only what he deserves to see.

Or

The simplistic ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment. 

And

We conservatives provide idiots the pleasure of feeling like they are daring avant-garde thinkers.

I suppose the Absolute is literally the simplest idea -- as is God, who is "absolute simplicity, which consists of all perfections eminently in harmony" (Garrogou-Lagrange). We are able to participate in these perfections, even if we can never be them. 

A few posts back we were discussing Beyond Being, about which G-L has this to say: the Deity is 

above being (super-being)..., as it is the Thought of Thought and the subsisting love of the Supreme Good.

And

From this it follows that the Deity as such is naturally unknowable and consequently ineffable. 

Nevertheless, we can know at least that much, which is far from nothing. We know that O is and must be, and that we are not O. We can deny the Absolute, but "Error cannot descend lower." Nevertheless, fallen man never stops trying to fall further.

The very last section of this massive tome is entitled Conclusion: the true God or radical absurdity. As in change my mind: "We must choose one of the two: either the ineffable essence," 

or else the universal confusion and destruction of all forms of truth and goodness in an absurd identification with error and evil.

Is it really that simple? The short answer is Yes, although it takes G-L 900 pages to explain why. But deny the Absolute, and "the words 'integrity' and 'lying' no longer have any precise significance. There are no longer any lies, but merely successive opinions." Truly truly, everything is just your opinion, man.

But here's the deal: "The supreme Cause is more knowable and intelligible in itself than all other causes." Likewise, "Matter of itself is obscure, God is light; time is more obscure than eternity." 

These are all implications of the simple affirmation that The worth of man lies in his consciousness of the Absolute.

This is why it is impossible to engage in honest debate with someone who denies the Absolute, because such a person has made an absolute of the constricted matrix in which he dwells. As Voegelin describes it, "Rational debate" cannot prevail

because the partner to the discussion [does] not accept as binding for himself the matrix of reality in which all specific questions concerning our existence as human beings are ultimately rooted; he has overlaid the reality of existence with another mode of existence.

AKA a Second Reality, such that 

behind the appearance of rational debate there [lurks] the difference of two modes of existence, of existence in truth and existence in untruth. The universe of rational discourse collapses, we may say, when the common ground of existence in reality has disappeared....

"In more gloomy moments" -- such as the moment we are collectively living through -- this corrosive force "may look strong enough to extinguish our civilization -- unless of course you are an ideologist yourself and identify civilization with the victory of Second Reality."

In which case, things are going just great. 

About the collapse of reality, let's switch seers to a very compact book called Philosophy of Science in the Light of the Perennial Wisdom that asks, "how do we know if anything is true?"

before we can begin to look for a criterion of truth, we have to ascertain that there is such a thing as truth. Now, unless one accepts that there is indeed such a thing as truth, nothing holds: remove truth and everything collapses.

Well, not if I have anything to say about it, for even to say "I do not know" is "to imply that I know one thing is true and that is precisely the fact that 'I do not know.'" 

And

To say there is such a thing as truth is to speak in absolute terms. The notions of "being," "reality," "truth," and "absoluteness" are thus intrinsically interrelated. Reason cannot prove them; on the contrary, it takes them for granted, that is to say, it cannot function in their absence.

To be continued.

A Map of the Bewilderness and God for the Perplexed

Scholastic Thomism, neo-scholastic Thomism, existential Thomism, analytical Thomism, phenomenological Thomism, transcendental Thomism, ressourcement Thomism, Cracow Circle Thomism, River Forest Thomism... 

Sometimes things just get too complicated for the simple trailer Thomist. Just when I think I've found a congenial precursor -- Rahner -- come to find out he's already yesterday's nous. In a book I read yesterday called Principles of Catholic Theology, White tells me I'm fifty years behind the times:

The theological anthropology of Karl Rahner that greatly influenced the life of the Church in the 1970s presumed a kind of normative modern European intellectual consensus in the academy and the Church that no longer exists today. 

He claims that this consensus "has perished in the flames of postmodernism," but then again, what hasn't? Postmodernism is the fire it pretends to extinguish, the pneumatological disease it pretends to cure. If it doesn't come straight from hell, nothing does. It is the Voice of the Abyss, a universal acid, and not the good kind.

Both this book and the one mentioned in the previous post give far too much weight to contemporary approaches to philosophy, when philosophy as such should be absolutely impervious to such trends and fashions. Harumph.  

White also cites "the rise of analytic philosophy and the return of scientific positivism," as if these have anything to do with the perennial philosophy, timeless truth, and irony-clad wisdom of the Raccoon. 

I see that Edward Feser has a  series of posts breaking it all down, but not simply enough for the trailer Thomist. 

Far from being liberated by postmodernity, White goes on to say that today's students

suffer acutely from the lack of any normative philosophical orientation or basic unified intellectual formation at all. Typically they are offered no unifying account of reality that spans across the diversity of their intellectual disciplines. And indeed, where could they procure one?

Besides here at One Cosmos? 

Students often long for some way to make sense of the unity of philosophical experience, so as to see how the world might have some analyzable, overarching meaning.

Do they? Harumph. Besides, who cares what students think? Isn't their very purpose in life to STFU and listen? 

We can begin by stipulating that there is One Cosmos, which bats away a host of contenders for the One Philosophy, since the latter (philosophy) must be ordered to the former (cosmos). I'm a simple man, so I begin with O and (¶), the rest being commentary.

Simple but not simplistic, for the space between intelligence and intelligibility is an infinitely evolving one; O is Absolute Being, while (¶) is the transcendental subject, and between them the party never stops. We exist in the tension between immanence and transcendence, or time and eternity, and that's just the way it is. Voegelin:

Eternal being realizes itself in time.

So there. Nor does eternal being "wait for philosophy in order to realize itself," since it never stops happening. History itself "is the process in which eternal being realizes itself in time." 

The locus of this realization is the philosopher, the "lover of wisdom" who "opens his soul to its irruption." 

There is no philosophy without philosophers, namely without men whose soul responds to eternal being.

All those other guys? Not philosophers. And all those other philosophies? Not philosophy.  

Harumph. Details to follow...

One Cosmos and Trailer Thomism

I recently read a book called Systematic Theology: A Roman Catholic Approach, by a Thomas Rausch. Yes, it's rather basic, but sometimes that's just what a lowdown trailer Thomist like me needs, i.e., a map of the territory I find myself lost in. 

This is the problem of the autodidactic (p)layman diving into a subject with no preparation or guidance: you might find yourself at the end before the beginning, or peaks before the foothills. You might find yourself refighting battles that have long since been settled, or supposing there is agreement where there is deep division and controversy. You can even think you're a "Thomist," but come to find out that this means very different things to different schools.

Near as I can tell, we fall in with the Transcendental Thomists, who, among other things, "sought to enter a dialogue with modern philosophy." More importantly, instead of -- or in addition to -- beginning with the senses, this approach turns "to the human subject and the transcendental reach of consciousness," and to "the dynamism of human understanding as disclosing far more than the object known."

Again, traditional Thomism begins with objects of the senses and from there proceeds to concepts and essences. Transcendental Thomism begins at the other end of the teloscope, with what Schuon would call the miracle of the human subject:

The first ascertainment which should impose itself upon man when he reflects on the nature of the Universe is the primacy of that miracle that is intelligence -- or consciousness or subjectivity -- and consequently the incommensurability between these and material objects, be it a question of a grain of sand or of the sun, or of any creature whatever as an object of the senses.

Interestingly, one of the main spokesmen for this perspective is Karl Rahner, whom records indicate I studied way back in 2012. But that's a perfect example of how the unguided amateur can dive in at the wrong end and not know which way is up. The main thing I remember from his books is that they were unnecessarily obscure and convoluted -- you know, German. It seems I may have to revisit those books.

There is additional commonality with Schuon, in that these thinkers distinguish "between intellect and reason. While discursive reason [is] important, giving us knowledge of the world, concepts, science, and symbols," the intellect is regarded "as an intuitive faculty inclined toward the 'First Truth'":  

The dynamism of human understanding [shows] a desire to move beyond the objects known, beyond finite existence, to unlimited Being as such, the existence of which [is] the a priori condition of the possibility for every speculative judgement.

We are finite but always oriented toward infinitude, always moving beyond what we know, "toward the infinite being of God in his incomprehensibility," which is the very "ground of all knowing":

the infinite is disclosed as the horizon against which every act of human knowledge takes place.... Without experiencing in some way the infinite, we would never grasp the finite.

 Thus, mystery proceeds in both directions, as it were:

both the natural world as well as the experience of transcendence revealed in human knowing testify to God's existence, even if the divine nature remains unknown, for God remains incomprehensible mystery.

This reminds me of Voegelin's conception of living in the dynamic space between the twin mysteries of immanence and transcendence. 

For man qua man is "spirit-in-the-world, open to the absolute" (Rausch). Or, in the words of Rahner, man is "absolute openness to being in general." 

Which leads to the subject of grace, what it is and where it comes from. For a Trailer Thomist such as myself, it seems to be in the nature of things, hence my pneumaticon (↓), which comes down to meet our transcendental striving (↑) toward the Absolute (O). Rahner says something quite similar, that

While still gratuitous, grace is revealed in the constitution of the human person as openness [o] to the absolute. Grace is God's free self-communication... (ibid.)

Rahner maintains that "a purely graceless world has never existed." He "sees the structures of human subjectivity as informed by grace a priori," such that -- and this is big -- "Anthropology is theology and conversely, theology is anthropology" (Rausch).

For me, this is just drawing out the implications of our being made in the image and likeness of the Absolute: we can start at either end, but especially with the Incarnation, we see that man and God are like two mirrors held up to one another. I suppose that fallenness means a disruption in this dynamism, but Christ represents its restoration. 

As it so happens, the very next section in the book goes into the meaning of the fall, and here again I find myself relating to Rahner's approach, whereby 

grace is understood as God's self-communication, God's gracious, enabling, salvific presence, offering to each a participation in the divine life, though of course God's free offer must also be freely accepted.

And the Incarnation "realizes perfectly what every person is potentially," which leads to the subject of divinization or theosis. Rahner sees a "fundamental unity of spirit and matter," and regards the Incarnation as "a moment toward the divinization of the world as a whole."

Or, as a multi-undiscplinary Trailer Thomist would put it, One Cosmos Under God.

All I got this morning.

In the Beginning and End is the Weird

We're still toying with the idea that Being could be a derivation of something deeper or higher, i.e., Beyond Being, or whether this constitutes a contradiction -- or possibly just a nominal difference (basically a name for the unknown and unknowable God of orthodox apophatic theology, not a separate reality). 

Garrigou-Lagrange writes that "The attributes which relate to God's very being" first include unity, truth, and "goodness or perfection." Next comes "infinity which excludes any limitation of essence," then  "immensity and omnipresence which exclude spatial limitation," and "eternity which excludes all time limitation." 

It is unclear from the context why he seems to place infinitude in a second tier of attributes, as if to imply that it is derived from one of the top three (unity, truth, goodness). Either way, when he says that infinitude "excludes any limitation of essence," he means that every being is composed of essence and existence, whereas only in God -- AKA necessary being -- are essence and existence one, in that God's essence is to exist.

Here again, what could be higher than necessary and self-subsisting being? If it is necessary, then it cannot be a possibility, virtuality, or entailment of something else. Nor is there any division in being, neither within itself nor from something else. Rather, the only thing from which it would be divided is non-being, or nothing, which cannot be. 

Again, from the standpoint of apophatic theology, God is of course nothing, but that is due simply to the limitations of finite language to comprehend infinitude. It doesn't necessarily imply a God beyond God, since -- in a manner of speaking, God (in reality) is always and already beyond God (as we conceive him). 

Let's review our cosmic flow chart from a couple posts ago:

Again, we see that the divine essence and supra-personal God is situated above the personal, who is part of relativity and maya. 

However, G-L writes that the "attributes thus derived from Being itself enable us to say of God that He is personal," which is the principle of our own consciousness, intelligence, and liberty. 

Okay, but what's He like, beyond the abstract attributes? This will take us into trinitarian theology, which is over 100 pages into the future. Suffice it to say, Necessary Being turns out to be relative after all, not to Beyond Being, but within itself, nor does this relation "posit in God an evident imperfection." 

Now interestingly, here is some convergence with Schuon, who often speaks of the intellect which is both uncreated and uncreatable. Likewise, G-L writes that  "The human intellect is not merely human, it is also an intellect." And "Inasmuch as it is an intellect, its object, like that of every intellect, is Being itself."

We might say that God is the eternal intellection of his own Being, only in an undivided manner; conversely, for us there is always a partition between being and knowing. Some would say the partition is erased in nondual realization of the divine essence, but I would be content with the beatific vision, which amounts to the same thing, only with me still there to enjoy it. Different yokes for different folks.

Being itself is uncaused; but again, a glance at the chart suggests that Being is in fact caused by Beyond Being. Is this coherent? In a way, yes, in the sense that Being itself is already "without limitations" and "incomprehensible." It is already infinite, and "nothing can be added to the infinite." 

Therefore Infinite Being + Beyond Being doesn't seem to add anything to the equation: "infinity plus one is still infinity." Divine Being is "completely present to itself in one permanent instant." 

Still, I wonder if the revelation of the Trinity helps us to handle some of the same metaphysical problems which the positing of Beyond Being is intended to resolve, so let's flip on ahead to the section covering this, and see if we can reconcile these two perspectives.

First of all, "Reason alone suffices to make known to us God's existence and His principle attributes." And 

It would seem that an infinite being must have infinite fecundity, which cannot but be manifested by the creation of beings that are necessarily finite.... He generates because of the superabundance of his infinite fecundity.

But

Even before God had created, it would have been true to say of Him, that the divine goodness is infinitely communicative.

"Revelation tells us"

that in God there is an eternal and unique Word, generated once and forever by the divine intellect of the Father.

In an analogous way, this could correspond to the antinomy of Beyond Being and Being, in that

The Father's intellect sees in the Word the final answer to the problems that philosophy and theology do not even succeed in positing.

This is a kind of supreme intersubjectivity that grounds our own personal intersubjectivity, both horizontally (with other persons) and vertically (with God), for the very life of the Godhead "is not one of solitude but of communicativeness in the highest degree."

Our own spiritual birth "bears a faint resemblance to the eternal generation of the Son," and "is in its supernatural reality a reflection of the sonship of the Word." 

Which is plenty weird enough for me, since it is always already way beyond my own being.

Beyond-Being and Absolute Relativity

A reader asks:

If "infinity is a mode of each of the divine attributes and not a principle from which they are derived," does that not imply that the divine attributes themselves are somehow other than infinite? If so, what could conceivably be antecedent to that which is infinite?

Here I must attempt to read Garrigou-Lagrange's mind, and it's challenging enough to read his writing. However, it seems this touches on the two meanings of infinite mentioned in yesterday's post: yes, the divine attributes are "infinite perfections," but Schuon often uses infinite as synonymous with "All-possibility," that is, with the "radiation" of the Absolute into manifestation:

that is infinite which is not determined by any limiting factor and therefore does not end at any boundary; it is in the first place Potentiality or Possibility as such, and ipso facto the Possibility of things, hence Virtuality. Without All-Possibility, there would be neither Creator nor creation, neither Maya nor Samsara. 

Conversely, G-L very much wants to preserve the absolute freedom of the Absolute to create, whereas Schuon's quasi-emanationism makes it appear almost determined. 

G-L is in agreement with Schuon that "Goodness is essentially communicative; good is diffusive of itself," but he disagrees that God must necessarily create. However, it's unclear if he rejects this for metaphysical or for dogmatic reasons, for he writes that it is the Church that

rejects this doctrine which fails to recognize the absolute freedom of God's creative love and the gratuitous nature of the gifts we have received.

While not strictly necessary, G-L calls it fitting for God to have created us and the world. 

Me? I take an in-between stance, that the Creator must create, but not necessarily this creation, thus preserving both his essential freedom and essential creativity.

The same reader writes that

I’m not sure that Schuon considers Beyond Being to be a ‘separate reality’; rather, it is the highest dimension of the Absolute itself (of which Being is its first ‘auto-determination’, so to speak, and thus already ‘relative’ but not another reality altogether).

This "auto-determination" may go to the same issue just mentioned, i.e., the divine freedom. For example, G-L writes that

A free gift is the more precious according as it is more gratuitous and might as well not have been given. It demands the more gratitude in proportion as it is less due. 

If the creation is a free gift, then it makes no sense that being itself is a kind of compulsory emanation from Beyond-Being. 

As for what goes on beyond being, it seems this goes to the sufficient reason for revelation, for it

supplies what reason could never ascertain. In God [i.e., within the Trinity] there is a supreme and necessary outpouring of Himself. It is the impenetrable mystery of His intimate life and of His interior fecundity...

Note that there is "necessity" within the Godhead, the necessary outpouring of the Son from the Father; but putting it this way doesn't sound quite right, because the necessity must be a consequence of "absolute love," or something, so it's somehow both free and necessary. 

Schuon often compares infinitude to the rays of the sun, but G-L specifically uses that analogy to say what God is not like: 

The supreme Good does not communicate Himself outwardly by a sort of internal necessity, after the manner of the sun which illumines things. His loving goodness is absolutely free.  

What does Bob think? As they say, a philosophy is generally true in what it affirms but false in what it denies. Just because the Church disavows emanationism, this doesn't mean that there is no truth in emanationism. Being, for example, is "necessarily" good, but it doesn't mean this or that good is necessary, so we must still cultivate gratitude.

More from our reader: 

I think Schuon would agree with you that Being and Beyond Being are simply twin aspects of the Supreme Reality. It’s unfortunate that Schuon often uses the word ‘impersonal’ to characterize the latter, when he actually means ‘supra-personal’. As you’ve correctly pointed out on more than one occasion, the greater cannot derive from the lesser!

I guess it's okay for one to say "supra-personal" so long as one defines what it means. Problem is, we can conceive of nothing higher or prior to personhood -- something from which persons would be a mere entailment or potentiality. This is a Big Difference between Christianity and eastern philosophies, since (as seen in yesterday's chart) personhood belongs to maya, which is to say, appearances. 

It also belongs to relativity, which opens another can of wormholes, because I agree with Schuon that the principle of relativity must somehow be situated in divinas, I just disagree on exactly how. For Schuon, it is grounded in the principle that Being (and Person) is relative to Beyond Being.

However, I would anchor relativity in the Trinity, as in the Son being relative to the Father, and vice versa. Here I would even venture the orthoparadox that relativity is absolute. Indeed, for me, this is the ultimate principle of the Trinity, and why it must be revealed. 

We can easily arrive at the principle of God -- of the One -- by the light of natural reason. But the same reason could not arrive at the orthoparadoxical idea that God is substance-in-relation, such that relation is irreducible to anything more fundamental; although 3 is 1+1+1, there is no 1 prior to the relations between them. This idea is wild but definitely not wooly, and we'll be getting more deeply into it as we proceed. 

Seems like a logical place to stop and catch our breath. I try to keep it under 1,000 words...

Being, Intelligence, Freedom, and the Two Meanings of Infinite

Let's undergo a critical examination of this helpful cosmic matrix (drawn up by perennialist Harry Oldmeadow and emailed to me by a One Cosmos stalker). It shows the various levels of being and the different ways of considering them (click to expand):

For example, the dimensions of Being and Beyond-Being are said to compose the Divine, even though only Beyond-Being is properly called Absolute, and in fact, this is the primary claim I want to examine and compare with Thomas. We're not choosing sides, just calling balls & strikes or strikes & gutters.

Note also that the graph places the Supra-personal God above the Personal God, the latter demoted to relativity, although still uncreated. 

On the face of it, supposing the greater cannot come from the lesser, how does the personal come from the impersonal? Schuon acknowledged that Advaita -- which is to say, nondual -- Vedanta was the most adequate expression of his perspective, but.... That's all, just but. The rest of this post is about the but.  

First of all, as alluded to in a recent post, we have to determine whether the distinction between Being and Beyond-Being is truly ontological, i.e., real, or just nominal, that is, a name. I say this because if we understand Being rightly, it is already way beyond being, in other words, at once infinitely knowable and infinitely incomprehensible.

Which goes to two meanings of the word "infinite." Let me add at this juncture that I've been wrestling with a book that is somewhat above my praygrade or right at the cusp of it, Volume II of Garrigou-Lagrange's God, His Existence and His Nature. He's a strict Thomist, so we're essentially trying to determine if Thomas can be reconciled with Schuon.

The answer is "no" if it means that Christian personalism must be subordinated to a Hindu or Buddhist nondualism. This would be a nonstarter for exoteric Christianity, but perennialist authors imply that there is a Christian esoterism as represented by someone like Eckhart that is essentially nondual and ascending all the way to Beyond-Being.

G-L acknowledges at the outset that "the formal principle of Deity as to what properly constitutes it as such, cannot be known by our natural powers," and quotes Dionysius to the effect that "The divine reality is prior to being and to all its differences: it is above being and above the one." 

Again, this implies that Being is already Beyond-Being; no need to posit a separate reality: "The Deity contains formally the notes of being, unity, and goodness, but it is above these." 

But "We have no grounds for conceiving a divine perfection" as "determined by another perfection extrinsic to it." However, in the chart above, the perfection of Being would be a first (and therefore relative) determination of Beyond-Being. 

Precisely because the divine Being is already -- from the human perspective -- beyond any intimate knowledge on our part, revelation is necessary: since "it is impossible for us to know, by the power of natural reason, what formally constitutes the divine nature as it is in itself," "there must be a supernatural revelation."

Now, Schuon maintains that the intellect itself is a revelation, i.e., that it is to the microcosm what revelation (as we typically think of it) is to the macrocosm, but if this is true, Bob is thinking to himself, it's hard to imagine an intellect without a person attached, and vice versa. We'll no doubt return to this subject.

Right now, in fact, because G-L goes into the metaphysical degrees of intelligence; at the bottom are lifeless creatures that have only being (but are nevertheless intelligible), while "intelligence belongs to the higher form of life." 

Of course, Schuon draws a distinction between mere intelligence and the Intellect as such, but I wonder if this is a necessary distinction; for as far as I'm concerned, to say intelligence is already to say God, otherwise it's not intelligence, just your opinion, man.

Can anything be prior to intelligence, bearing in mind that the greater cannot come from the lesser? G-L writes that liberty, for example, cannot possibly be prior to intelligence; rather, "the free being is intelligent. It is useless to dwell on this point." "First comes the intellect," and "liberty is derived from it."

What about the personal God being caused by something beyond itself? This seems impossible if God is defined as the uncaused cause; nor can God be the cause of himself, "for nothing can be a sufficient cause of its own existence, if existence is caused." God can only be "His own sufficient reason," such that the very principle of causality is derived from God's own intrinsic sufficient reason.

For G-L, Being is prior to everything, including infinitude. He writes, for example, that "infinity is a mode of each of the divine attributes and not a principle from which they are derived" (emphasis mine). 

Again, Schuon often seems to equate Absolute + Infinite, whereas G-L is saying that infinitude is a mode of Absolute Being, and it is this mode that carries the other properties of Being into creation, i.e., goodness, unity, truth, beauty, etc.

As to the two meanings of infinite, one is negative, as in merely not-finite, whereas another must be positive, as in maxed out to the max, as with, say, God's goodness. 

There's also the matter of God's Big Hint as to what and who he is, for "God Himself has told us His name," that is, I am who I am. Similarly, in the NT, "I am Alpha and Omega," "who was, who is, and who is to come," meaning outside time and space as we conceive them. He is "not only capable of existing," but rather, existence is His very Being (in Him existence and essence are one, or His essence is existence).

Unless there's something above Being, but if so, it either is or isn't, and from nothing nothing comes. 

Having said that, we appreciate the fact that from our perspective God is certainly nothing, or no-thing. Just yesterday I was thumbing through a book of wise cracks by the Catholic mystic Angelus Silesius, and he says many things along these lines, for example, 

God is an utter No-thingness, / Beyond the touch of Time and Place: / The more thou graspest after Him, / The more he fleeeth thy embrace.  

Or

What Cherubs know sufficeth not: beyond their zone / I would fain to take my flight into where no-thing's known. 

And "Naught can ever be known in God": 

The more thou knowest God, the more thou wilt confess / That what He truly is, thou knowest less and less.

This is a radical apophaticism, but does this imply conformity to a separate realm of Beyond-Being, or is Being itself weird enough to cover it?

To be continued.  

Man in Search of God in Search of Man

I'm reading a book called Principles of Catholic Theology by Thomas Joseph White, the first of a projected four volumes that will seek 

to underscore the harmony of divine revelation and natural human reason, and acknowledge faith's deep unity with reason...

So, right up our alley. I was especially arrested by the following passages, since they go to one of our enduring preoccupations. White speaks of the two-way, "descending and ascendent wisdom" that must inform theology. Beginning at the top,

Theological wisdom by its very nature depends upon divine revelation and is therefore a descending form of wisdom, originating from above and outside the sphere of human intellectual accomplishment... 

So, (↓). Starting at the other end, "Philosophical wisdom is 'ascendent' in relation to divine revelation,"

insofar as it is the natural intellectual medium by virtue of which human beings may arrive rationally at posing ultimate questions regarding the origins and purpose of existence, the physical cosmos, living things, and human rational animals in particular.

Which sounds like (↑):

It is this ascendent sphere of inquiry that allows human beings to ask, and even answer in natural forms of reasoning, questions pertaining to the existence of God, the nature of the human person, the dignity of the spiritual soul, and the question of our human destiny in the face of death. 

Now, these two movements can never be separated, but nor should they be conflated, for 

The two forms of wisdom are distinct but complementary and potentially interactive.

Also, although they are complementary, as in all primordial complementarities one must be ontologically prior, and in this case it must obviously be (↓), for no amount of unalloyed (↑) can result in (↓). For it is written: No man can pull himself up by his own buddhastraps. 

Having said that, if we pull back for a wider perspective... Well, first of all, everything originates at the top, which we symbolize O. Therefore, (↓) is a kind of emanation from O, as (↑) is ordered to O. In short, (↑) is not just random, but rather, has its telos in O, which is why we call it the "divine attractor." 

Looked at this way, we might say that (↑) is already a form of (↓), and at the very least must be considered a Big Hint, since there is no drive or instinct without its proper object. Eyes are for seeing, wings are for flying, hunger is for food, minds are for knowing, and (↑) is for unknowing O.

That's as far as I've gotten in the book, but it implies somewhat of a simplification of the five-storey cosmos we were discussing in the previous post: there is the natural and the supernatural, linked by (↑↓). But what if there are more storeys to the story? 

Oldmeadow has a handy chart I wish I could reproduce, but you'll have to visualize it. At the top is Beyond-Being (i.e., the Godhead or O), followed by Being (the Creator or personal God), and that right there is going to be controversial from within an orthodox exoteric Christian perspective. For if this is an ontological and not just nominal distinction (i.e., between God and Godhead), then... we've got to do something about it!

Certainly I don't anticipate White going into this distinction, unless it's in the merely nominal sense of apophatic vs. cataphatic theologies. In other words, even -- or especially -- the most orthodox among us respect this human distinction and limitation, for example, Thomas:

This is the final human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know God.

On the one hand, "we can know him in as many ways as created things represent him," but if God can be known in his essence, only he could do so, for "Created things are not sufficient to represent the creator," and "Whatever is comprehended by a finite being is itself finite."

Hmm. Where does this leave us? Is there a loophole, or a way to penetrate this mystery a little more deeply?

Let's go back to Schuon's distinction in divinas between Being and Beyond-Being. If we are the terrestrial image and likeness, then perhaps this goes to the distinction in us between higher and lower modalities, i.e., between spirit/intellect and soul/psychic, which I symbolize (¶) and (•), respectively.  

This being the case, then (¶) would be ordered more directly to the unknowable and unspecifiable O. 

Schuon writes that 

In metaphysics, it is necessary to start from the idea that the Supreme Reality is absolute [O], and that being absolute it is infinite.... And that is infinite which is not determined by any limiting factor and therefore does not end at any boundary; it is in the first place Potentiality or Possibility as such... Without All-Possibility, there would be neither Creator nor creation...

Here we run into a problem, and a big one, even though for us it resolves an even bigger problem. But in the traditional Thomistic view, God is pure act, and therefore, absolutely devoid of potential. You could even say that if God has potential then he can't be God, because potency implies a lack of something, a privation which is yet to be actualized.

Last week I read something by Garrigou-Lagrange that may leave us a little wiggle room: that God is

immobile, not with the immobility of inertia, but with the immobility of supreme activity.

And what is that supposed to mean, i.e., the immobility of supreme activity? For it almost seems like an oxymoronic way to sneak potential in through the side door. It almost seems a way to speak implicitly of what Schuon characterizes more explicitly, again, that "God is the Absolute, and being the Absolute, He is equally the Infinite" (infinitude being All-Possibility, the very principle of creativity).

Oldmeadow goes on to explain that 

the theological language of exoteric monotheism tends to stop short at the fourth degree, which is to say that the two highest degrees [Being and Beyond-Being] are often assimilated in the notion of the Personal Creator God.

BUT

within esoteric Christianity -- in Eckhart, for instance -- the distinction between God and Godhead remains intact.

Except that Eckhart would never characterize himself as "esoteric," rather, fully orthodox, only more so, i.e., as following the implications all the way up. 

That's all I got this morning. 

A Five Story Split Level Cosmos

One of the traditional proofs discussed by Garrigou-Lagrange is based on the degrees of being. Just look around, and what do you see? I'll give you a hint: inanimate objects, living things, and rational beings, which means that this cosmos must have at least three likely storys. 

But where's the foundation? And even supposing we agree on the foundation, the foundation is not the plan. Rather, the plan, as they say, is first in intention but last in execution. So if the plan involves rational corporeal beings, these latter must be closer to the real foundation of things. Seen this way, matter is but a means to an end.

G-L writes that if we widen our view and 

consider the being that is the foundation of truth, there are various degrees for, "the things that are greater in being, are greater in truth"; that which is richer in being is also richer in truth.

Again, there are, for example, contingent truths, as well as those truths that are necessary, universal, and eternal, such as the principle of identity, the latter therefore being situated higher on the scale of truth and being. I'll jump to the bottom line:

"When there is greater or less, when there are degrees in anything, then the perfect also exists; if, then, a certain being is better than a certain other, there must be one which is perfect, and this can only be the divine" (Thomas, in G-L).

Considered from another angle, we could say there is reality and there are appearances, the former being of a higher order than the latter. 

Otherwise, we are in the position of attributing equal value to dreams and hallucinations as we do to science and logic. And if this were true, then progressivism would be no better or worse than any other delusion. It would mean that we might even end up being ruled by a class of mentally ill people -- decroded gerontocrats and developmentally arrested adultolescents pulling their strings -- and that could never happen.  

In the first paragraph we alluded to three of the most obvious degrees of being, but how many are there in reality? It depends on which way we look, from the bottom-up or the top-down, and even then it's a bit like asking how many colors there are in the spectrum. A good answer might be three primary colors, but a better one would be the infinitude of shades ranging from Aero to Zaffre, and Zomp back to Aqua.      

As to the cosmos, we used to have more levels prior to the Reformation, which left us with two: God and world. In so doing, it eliminated intellect and intellection, relying instead on faith. This left the field wide open for the further scientistic reduction of the cosmos to the single level raunch-style home of postmodernity.

Conversely -- I'm looking at a book called Frithjof Schuon and the Perennial Philosophy, by Harry Oldmeadow -- I see that Schuon lives in a rambling five-story cosmos ranging from Beyond Being (or Godhead) at the top to the Corporeal Realm at the bottom; in between are Being, Spirit, and Soul. 

Now, one intriguing point that may give rise to difficulty is the division, not only in the human realm, but in the divine one as well; just as there are degrees of being in man, so too are there degrees in divinas, but here again, this is not an obstacle for traditional orthodox Christians who have no issue with the existence of angelic beings and intelligences. We never left the old five-story cosmos, so it's more of a problem for Protestantism, which banished all intermediaries between man and God. I say, the more the merrier.

Schuon often discusses the difference between ego and intellect, which correspond to the levels of Soul and Spirit, respectively. Here again, Protestantism essentially collapses these two levels into the Soul alone. If there's an Intellect, it's too warped and attenuated by the Fall to be of much use anyway.  

As Oldmeadow describes it, the Intellect is "the faculty which perceives the transcendent." It is conformed to the latter in the same way our senses are conformed to the material world: "The Intellect receives intuitions and apprehends realities of a supra-phenomenal order." 

It is, in Schuon's words, "a receptive faculty and not a power which produces." Rather, "it receives and transmits; it is a mirror," in the same way lower degrees of knowledge more or less adequately (but never perfectly) mirror the world.  

It is "that which participates in the divine Subject," that which in man is "most conformable to God," the "transpersonal essence of the subject." Intellection is a "naturally supernatural" grace...

Going back to our month long review of McGilchrist's The Matter With Things, I think we might agree that the mode of intellection sounds very right-brainish, such that folks with a high degree of intellection probably have a highly functioning right cerebral hemisphere, but we'll leave that to the neuropsychologists. Here we are practicing pneumopsychology or something.

At any rate, Schuon points out that the transcendent faculty of Intellect is "capable of direct contact with Reality," which is precisely how McGilchrist characterizes the RH, in contrast to the LH, which lives within its maps, abstractions, and ideologies. Nothing wrong with that, but its a lower story.

This must mean that standard-issue exoteric theology is more of an LH undertaking, but recall what was said yesterday about the x-factor that must enter the (LH) system from outside and above, and it is the Intellect that is more directly in contact with this, indeed, may even be a kind of local prolongation of it, speaking of continuity and discontinuity. 

It is also noteworthy that Intellect is often spoken of as "heart" as opposed to "head" knowledge, and if I recall correctly, McGilchrist said something about the RH literally being more directly and richly connected to the heart, but in any event, let's not collapse our five storys into a house of neurology.  

We shall resume our real estate inspection tomorrow... 

Prove the Existence of God With This One Easy Trick!

The simple trick is to flip ahead to page 372 of God: His Existence and His Nature, where there is a summary of the classic attributes of God; these include unmoved mover, necessary being, and ground of intelligence, yada yada. 

The various ways to God are interrelated in complex ways, but for me, the way of intelligence is the most persuasive, or at least the most ready-to-hand. We're always using our intelligence, and it must come from somewhere and know something. Conversely, if it comes from nowhere and knows nothing, we'd all be tenured. 

Therefore, in order to keep the mind limber, I'm going to flip back to a subsection called The first intelligible, the first truth, source of truth, and maybe, like yesterday, weave it together with Schuon's essay on the proofs of God.  

Schuon mainly deals with the ontological, cosmological, teleological, and mystical proofs of God. Like Garrigou-Lagrange he also touches on the proof via miracles, but this I find the least persuasive, at least a priori. Once everything else falls into place, then it is easier to accept the miraculous a posteriori, since, once we establish his existence, God can do whatever he feels like he wants to do, gosh!

Lazy man though I am, I wouldn't necessarily want to begin with the exceptional or inexplicable, and from this deduce the existence of God. In an age both scientific and scientistic, I don't think this works, especially in world full of people who have been educated -- or indoctrinated, rather -- beyond their intellectual station.  

Better to wield a proof that goes to the heart of the scientific enterprise itself, which prides itself on its great *intelligence*. That "all truth comes from God" is in a way the least and greatest miracle -- least in the sense that it is so common, greatest in the sense that it leads all the way to the toppermost of the cosmos.

As Schuon says,

The first thing that should strike a man when he reflects on the nature of the Universe is the primacy of the miracle of intelligence -- or consciousness or subjectivity -- whence the incommensurability between it and material objects, whether a grain of sand or the sun, or any creature whatever as an object of the senses.

It doesn't get easier than that, but then again, not everyone is capable of abiding in this simple truth, which we might call the "mysticO-intellection" of pure metacosmic Dudism. 

In fact, while looking up that passage, I stumbled upon this one:

A proof is not convincing because it is absolute -- for this it could never be -- but because it actualizes something self-evident in the mind.

Thus, 

To prove the Absolute is either the easiest or the most difficult of things, depending upon the intellectual conditions of the environment.  

Also, when speaking of logic, to say proof is to say premises and therefore Gödel, from whom there is no escape in this or any other world. 

In other words, we cannot use logic to prove that which escapes logic, let alone that which is the very ground, source, and possibility of logic. Otherwise we are in the position of someone who searches in time for the origins of eternity, when the actual relation is the converse (eternity being the source and goround of time). 

Now, Gödel's theorems do not say that man is confined to what logic can prove, rather, that we can know truths that are unprovable. This is because, as Schuon writes,

Correlative to every proof is an element eluding the determinism of mere logic and consisting of either an intuition or a grace; now this element is everything.

Why everything? Because it is precisely this x-factor which allows man to slip through the web of his own definitions, this because the intellect is ultimately conformed to nothing less than the Absolute.

Schuon provides a good segue back to G-L, writing that

Nothing is more arbitrary than a rejection of the classical proofs of God, each of which is valid in relation to a certain need for logical satisfaction. 

But because of the x- or (↓) factor just mentioned, "this need increases in proportion to ignorance, not in proportion to knowledge," to the point that the people most in need of proof will be unaware of any need at all, because they are sealed in their own matrix of assumptions and premises: a vertically closed system. But Genesis teaches that God never premised a closed garden.

For to deny its vertical source is like intelligence slitting its own throat. Which is not very intelligent, but there it is.

The argument from intelligence ascends through the degrees of being "not only to a first being, but to a first truth, which is the ultimate basis of all other truths" (G-L). 

Let's start with the truism that things are more or less true, i.e., that there are contingent truths and there are necessary truths, the latter of a higher order than the former. For example, it is 83° outside, but it didn't have to be. Conversely, the principles of identity and sufficient reason must be, in this or any other cosmos. 

G-L writes that "Contingent truths or facts are of the lowest degree [of truth]; above these rank the necessary conclusions of the sciences, and in the highest place are the first principles," or what Schuon calls the "principial" realm -- although here Schuon departs in important ways from G-L, and perhaps this would be a good place to discuss those differences.

Basically, G-L follows the the classic formulation of the three levels of abstraction, from the scientific to the mathematical to the metaphysical, each less material and contingent on the way up. But Schuon doesn't leave it at that, rather, with further degrees of being in divinas, which is to say in God.

Not to say that he's correct, but he does have a point. To make the point, I'm going to transition over to a very compact summary of the degrees and modes of reality contained in a book called Philosophy of Science in the Light of the Perennial Wisdom.

One way or another, there's no way to avoid a confrontation with the degrees of being. Most obviously, we know that there are things and that there are minds (or subjects or consciousness), and what are we going to do about it? We can live with the dualism, or we can (for example) default to an unsatisfactory material monism that again essentially slits the throat of intelligence, but what's really going on in the cosmos? 

I guess we'll find out in the next post.